RNC CHAIRWOMAN RONNA MCDANIEL
SUMMER MEETING GENERAL SESSION
AUGUST 2, 2019
Charlotte, NC
[REMARKS AS PREPARED FOR DELIVERY]

Hello everyone and welcome to our Summer Meeting! Thank you to our North Carolina Delegation Michael, Mark, and Ada for hosting. I want to thank the RNC staff, including our Chief of Staff Richard Walters; our Chief Operating Officer Tinna Jackson; our Member Services team of Emily Threadgill, Mariana Herrera, Callie Estes, and Anna Dorsey; Co-Chair Tommy Hicks and his staff; Finance Chairman Todd Ricketts and our incredible finance team, Shannon and Katy, and our guest speakers Dr. Carson and Mick Mulvaney!
 
Thank you to everyone who is working so hard to make our 2020 Convention here a success, including Marcia Lee Kelly, president and CEO; Texas National Committeewoman Toni Anne Dashiell, chair of the Committee on Arrangements; and Louis DeJoy, national finance chair of the Convention. As always, thank you to my husband Patrick and my kids Abigail and Nash.
 
Everyday I am thankful for President Trump and Vice President Pence and their leadership.
 
Think of everything they have accomplished in less than three years!

·       6 million new jobs, more than half of them filled by women
·       5 million people off food stamps
·       Unemployment hitting record lows, including for African Americans, Hispanic Americans,   
         Asian American, and women
·       13 regulations eliminated for each new one added, which saves taxpayers $33 billion.
·       9,000 Opportunity Zones across the country to spur $100 billion in investments that will help
         nearly 35 million Americans
 
And that’s not all!

·       Criminal justice reform
·       Health care premiums are going down and drug pricing is becoming more transparent
·       A stronger, well-funded military
·       Greater support for our veterans and their families
·       The wall on our southern border is being built
·       The federal judiciary is being reshaped at a record pace, and of course…
·       Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court!
 
I can't wait to re-elect President Trump in 2020!

Under this President, people’s lives are being made better every single day. Look no further than the President’s tax cuts, which are helping families across America. Mary from Wisconsin is using her tax savings to make a down payment on a house. Mona and her husband in Florida are saving money for retirement and helping their grandchildren pay for college. Rochelle decided to start a small art business in Nevada. And Roger found a manufacturing job in Ohio and is finally able to afford better medical care.
 
The media refuses to cover the successes of this administration. That’s why every single one of us has to keep sharing these stories and celebrating a President who is fighting for us every day and making America great again!
 
Thanks to the energy and enthusiasm for President Trump’s accomplishments, the RNC continues to break fundraising records. Since my term began, we have brought in over $420 million.
 
The RNC has raised $97 million so far this cycle. The DNC has raised just $44 million. We raised a record $21 million in June. They raised just $8.5 million. We have $44 million cash on hand. They have just $9 million. We have zero debt. They have $6 million in debt. And most importantly, we won the annual RNC vs. DNC softball game, 19-8!
 
We’ve had 12, seven-figure online fundraising days already this year. We’ve added nearly one million new small-dollar donors since the President took office, including over 421,000 just this year. New people are joining our movement daily!
 
It’s not just small-dollar donors. We have increased the portion of our fundraising from major donors from 33 percent to 40 percent since 2018. People who stayed on the sidelines in 2016 are now all in for 2020.
 
We are using this record fundraising to further grow our permanent field program and state-of-the-art voter technology. We’ve invested nearly $2 million in our field program and we have over 185 field staff, including new regional political directors and state directors across the country – far ahead of where we were at this point in the 2016 cycle.
 
So far, 56 states and territories have enrolled in Project GROW, and 50 of them reached the “On the Rise” level. Kentucky, Washington and Maine have even moved up into the Leader’s Circle level.
 
In 2016 we had 700,000 volunteers engaging with voters; we are going to have 1.6 million by 2020. And we’ve already started that process.
 
We have already hosted two National Weeks of Training to train and re-train thousands of activists across the country. During our first National Week of Training in June, we held over 270 Trump Victory Leadership Initiative trainings. We held over 970 MAGA Meet-ups, which 26,500 people attended in all 50 states and four territories. We just wrapped up our second National Week of Training, which emphasized voter registration. We trained over 6,000 people in 14 battleground states to conduct volunteer-based voter registrations.
 
Finally, we recently launched WinRed, a fundraising platform to build our donor base in support of the President and Republicans. WinRed has already saved over 6 million credit cards for Trump donors, who can give to any committee or campaign that uses the platform. WinRed is integrated with our Data Trust, which means better, more accurate voter files for every campaign in America. Democrats do not have their own version of Data Trust, which puts us far ahead of the game.
 
We are working hard. We’re putting everything we have on the field. Because look at what we’re up against. The Left has been taken over by people who get offended by the American flag! They want shoes taken off the shelves because they have the Betsy Ross flag on them. They burn our flag at protests. They rip it down to advertise how little they care about our country. As head of the Republican Party, I promise we will always stand for our flag and our national anthem!
 
Democrats have gone all in on a radical, socialist agenda of higher taxes, government takeover of health care, open borders, abolish ICE, sanctuary cities, and impeachment. They champion a $32 trillion government-run health care system that would abolish private health insurance – ripping nearly 200 million people off their plans. They want to implement a $93 trillion, radical Green New Deal that would put a $600,000 tax burden on every household. They want to guarantee money for people unwilling to work. And to top it all off, they want to eliminate air travel.
 
Policies even Democrats once considered fringe and out of the mainstream are now the norm for their party. Their first two debates made that perfectly clear. We witnessed a majority of 2020 Democrats support decriminalizing illegal immigration and providing illegal immigrants with taxpayer-funded health care. They raised their hands to abolish private health insurance and hike taxes on the middle-class. They defended taxpayer-funded infanticide and late-term abortion. They are extreme and out of step with Americans on every single issue.
 
Then there’s “the Socialist Squad.” They make light of the devastation of September 11th. They don’t support Israel – instead, they spout anti-Semitism. They disparage our law enforcement. They compare al-Qaeda to the U.S. Army and equate our brave border patrol officers with Nazis. They trash America and want to turn our country into another Venezuela or Cuba. 
 
The Socialist Squad tries to glamorize socialism, but it is our job to explain what that really means. Talk to anyone who has lived through socialism, and you will hear their stories of desperation and struggle. We are launching a video series soon about victims of socialism to spread their message far and wide. Here’s a little preview. 
 
One of the victims you saw in that video is Warner Jimenez, a Venezuelan exile who lives in Orlando. As the former mayor of Maturin, he was harassed by the Maduro regime and forced to leave his post. He recently founded the Venezuelan Alliance for Freedom in Orlando to support other Venezuelan exiles and speak out for President Trump’s policies. 
 
I met Pepe Cancio during one of my trips to Miami and was inspired by his story.  Pepe fled Castro’s Cuba in 1960 and never took for granted the life he built in this land of opportunity. He served as a Private First Class in the U.S. Army during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He has been one of President Trump’s strongest supporters because of his stance against socialism and record of results on the economy, tax cuts, jobs, and veterans’ programs. Pepe is grateful to President Trump for bringing God back into the White House and prosperity back into our country.
 
Maria del Carmen Guzman Weese came to the United States at 12 years old to escape tyranny in Cuba. The regime froze her family’s bank accounts and cost them everything they had, including business properties. She warned us – in her own words – about “a government that promised everything and delivered nothing.” Sound familiar? Maria became a U.S. citizen at 21 years old. The same oath she took that day, she has taken seriously every day since. She has volunteered for our Party for two decades and has served in local elected positions in Colorado.
 
There are so many people like Warner, Pepe and Maria whose journeys are full of hardship and hope. They speak out in support of our President because they know the Democrats’ agenda would cause the same ruin they once fled. They revere our flag and our Pledge of Allegiance. They know we live in the greatest, most welcoming country on earth. And they know what it takes to keep this the greatest, most welcoming country on earth.
 
Remember their names every time you hear the left mocking our Party, our policies, and our people. These are the people they demonize. These are the people they continue to ignore and silence. These are the people who don’t matter to them, because their stories don’t fit the Left’s narrative. But these are the people fighting for us and our country, and we will continue to fight for them.
 
President Trump said, “America will never be a socialist country.” We are going to help him keep that promise!
 
In his 1989 farewell address to the nation, President Ronald Reagan said: “Once you begin a great movement, there’s no telling where it will end. We meant to change a nation, and instead, we changed a world.”
 
We are members of a great movement. President Trump is leading the charge to Keep America Great. And together, we will re-elect him in 2020!

 
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